Judging Freedom - Ukraine-Russia War, Latest w_Col. Douglas Macgregor

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

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Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, December 8th, 2022. It's a little after three o'clock in the afternoon on the East Coast of the United States.

You all know our guest today, our regular go-to guy on military matters and particularly what's happening in Ukraine, Colonel Douglas McGregor, whose background requires no introduction to this audience. Colonel, we have a lot to discuss, so let me start going through it. Yesterday, Secretary of State Tony Blinken told the Wall Street Journal that the United States public policy is to return Russian troops to the pre-February 24th border, which would mean that they're totally out of Ukraine. How realistic is this and how unwise is it for him to state that as American public policy? Well, if his intention is to ensure that there can be no negotiations, then he succeeded, because that's unacceptable to the Russians. Perhaps that's the reason he did it. But is this a realistic public policy of the United States that any amount of,

any rational amount of force introduced by NATO or United States dollars could have as a realistic goal the removal of all Russian forces to the pre-February 24th border or to where they were on February 23rd. It's the impossible dream. We ought to just forget about it. It's an irrelevant statement. It's unworthy of any attention. Okay. You recently commented to me off air about some comments that President Putin made, which were very, very intriguing. I found them intriguing, and I think the audience will as well, concerning nuclear weapons. What did President Putin say, and how does it interact with American policy with respect to the use of nukes? Well, as you'll recall, in June, he reiterated the policy that under no circumstances

would the Russians employ nuclear weapons unless they were attacked by a power that used nuclear weapons against them. Right. What he's done now is he said that he's re-examined this. And there are certain reasons. One is, of course, that Biden renounced essentially the no first use approach of his predecessor and said that he would now use nuclear weapons against conventional forces, not only against nuclear forces, even if we were not attacked with a nuclear weapon. Let me stop you right now. How reckless is that?

Well, this is the President of the United States who made these statements and signed this new policy into doctrine. It was very ill-advised. I don't know of anybody in Washington that thinks it's a good idea, but that's what's happened. And since then, we've had lots of loose talk from people about tactical nuclear exchanges or winning limited nuclear wars, this kind of nonsense. Okay, so as a result of this policy change, which I don't think was on the front page of the New York Times, but as a result of this policy change, which I don't think was on the front page of the New York Times, but as a result of this policy change, what did President Putin say or do?

Well, let me go one step further. There's one other thing that has occurred that induced him to change his position. We've placed a lot of aircraft in the theater that are capable of delivering nuclear weapons. And I'm sure most of your viewers are aware that we do have nuclear weapons on the ground in Germany. So it's not impossible that we could load nuclear bombs into our weapons, nuclear warheads on cruise missiles. And of course, we have a battle group at sea, you know, a CBBG, aircraft carrier battle group in the Adriatic or somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean that also has nuclear weapons that it can employ. So what he's now said is that we will not simply sit by

when we see evidence that the United States or its allies are preparing a first strike against us. In other words, if we detect that you are weaponizing your cruise missiles and aircraft with nuclear weapons, we will no longer sit still and do nothing. We will strike. Of course, that's a very frightening prospect. That's terrifying. Because now you're asking the enemy, the potential enemy in Russia, is saying we may make the judgment call that you're preparing to nuke us, in which case we will nuke you first. Colonel, has World War III already started? No.

You have a war between Russia and the United States via a proxy. That's ongoing. And there are Europeans involved with this. Some are enthusiastic, as the Poles, and others are not. No, we're preparing to do something with a nuclear weapon, we are essentially asking for Armageddon. In a column that you wrote just last week, which is filled with your typical references to history and the failures of American leadership to learn the bitter lessons

of history, you have articulated that national strategy, if it exists at all, I'm quoting you precisely, consists of avoiding conflict unless we are attacked and compelled to fight. Is that any longer national strategy, the avoidance of conflict? I mean, you can't even suggest that that's national strategy anymore, especially in light of what Tony Blinken just said to the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Yes, until the Cold War ended, military power existed first and foremost to deter anyone from attacking us. But we made it very clear that we were not going to start a war. We made that clear repeatedly. Every president since

World War II, all through the Cold War, had always said, we will not start a war. And made it very clear to the Russians that we would not attack them unless they attacked us. So we've avoided a number of crises, some of which are known and some of which people know nothing about that way. But that's really no longer the underlying fundamental in our strategy. And this goes back to the decision that we had achieved a monopoly of power. It was the, somebody called it the monopolar moment. And we became the indispensable nation that could effectively bully anybody, anywhere, anytime to do whatever we wanted them to do.

We got away with that for quite a long time. And I think that Russia has now drawn the line in the sand and said, we won't be bullied by you anymore. When President Biden spoke in Warsaw, I guess it's about four or five months ago, obviously you were listening, you characterized what he said was hot with emotion and mired in the ideology of moralizing globalism. What's moralizing globalism? Well, the globalists are convinced of their moral superiority to everyone else, and therefore anyone who disagrees with them, whether it's climate change, open borders, cultural Marxism, whatever it happens to be, is by definition evil and deserves the worst. That's the essence of moralizing globalism. And they are prepared, these neocons are prepared to shed American

blood to advance their moralizing globalism. And I guess that underscores precisely what Secretary Blinken said to the Wall Street Journal yesterday. I think that's a very accurate analysis. Okay. You also point out, this is a little long, but I have to quote it. At this writing, which was just last week, 540,000 Russian combat forces are assembled in southern Ukraine, western Russia, and Belarus. The numbers continue to grow, but the numbers already include a thousand rocket artillery systems, thousands of tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones, and 5,000 armored vehicles and 11,000 tanks, hundreds of unmanned fixed-wing attack aircraft helicopters and bombers.

Actually, it was 1,800 tanks. Okay. Then, of course, you said, in the greatest understatement in the modern age, this new force has little in common with the Russian army that intervened months ago on February 24, 2022. Okay, so President Putin is now serious.

If he's amassing 540,000 troops plus all this other hardware, is there any way that America and whoever else is involved, Poles, et cetera, can possibly negate or neutralize that? Well, militarily, no. I don't think there is. But I still think if we were willing to negotiate on the basis of no preconditions, in other words, both sides come together and are willing to talk without demanding anything. This nonsense of you have to leave Ukraine before we talk to you has to be dropped. Well, that's not going to happen. That's not going to happen.

Then I think you could forestall this or perhaps eliminate the disaster that is staring us in the face, which is the complete destruction of Ukraine, its armed forces, and its government. But I don't know that that's possible. But militarily, no. Right now, they are dispersed in those areas that I just told you. In fact, I found out earlier today that the train, massive numbers of trains have carried huge quantities of equipment and military personnel from Russia west into Belarus, western Russia, and into southern Ukraine. Those have slowed now to almost a trickle. So most of the movement is over. The forces are there, and they probably exceed at this stage of the game the 540,000 I pointed to. They may be closer to 600 for all we know. And that has to, when you start counting these things, it has to be done by a combination of people on the ground, as well as

people that have access to space-based or commercial satellites that can see what's there. Since the last time we spoke, Colonel, the Russians have revealed that a third drone attack occurred within a couple hundred miles of Moscow and that it emanated from Ukraine, assuming it did emanate from Ukraine. And this drone attack destroyed a Russian fuel depot. U.S. intel is obviously on the ground in Ukraine. a Russian fuel depot. U.S. intel is obviously on the ground in Ukraine. I'm going to assume, you correct me if I'm wrong, I know you're a tank commander, not intel, but you certainly know the basics better than anybody.

The U.S. intel is not only spying on Russia, it's spying on the Ukrainians. So U.S. government must have known, I think, forgive me if I'm extrapolating beyond what is rational to the military mind, the U.S. government must have known that those drones were going to be fired. And since they were going to be fired into Russia, I would think somebody at the Pentagon or even the White House ought to have known that, either signed off on it or knowingly looked the other way. Your thoughts on this? Well, more details are emerging slowly about these actions.

The one at Engels Air Force Base was the most serious one, not because it did any damage. It killed some people, but it didn't do any serious damage. It killed some people, but it didn't do any serious damage. But that base is the centerpiece of the, let's put it this way, the airborne nuclear deterrent. So that attracted a lot of attention. The other base is much less important. And I don't know anything about how much damage was done at this fuel storage area luckily for the russians fuel is the least of their concerns they're swimming in it so that's not going to make much difference there there is information that is beginning to emerge that suggests that these drones were not

launched from ukraine they were launched from within russia and what most americans don't understand is that russia is enormous in size Its border is not uniformly protected as it was under the Soviet Union. There are vast areas of the Russian border that are open, and you can move into Russia from the Caucasus, from Central Asia, even potentially over the border from Finland, though this doesn't appear to have been the case this time. So it's not impossible that these drones were launched and then small teams of people infiltrated near the targets

and provided the last terminal guidance to these aircraft. We know Ukrainian saboteurs are in Russia because we know of the Karabakh assassination that occurred almost under Putin's nose a few months ago. Right. You know, there's something else here. There's a possibility that these drones, which are very large, by the way, these are not small by any means, may have flown where commercial airliners fly. They could have even had transponders on them that conveyed the impression that they were commercial, not military.

We just don't know, but that's a distinct possibility. So if they launched them from inside Russia, used commercial airline approaches through the country, that would have masked what they were. And that explains why the integrated air defenses did not pick up on them. Okay, let's get back to who could have authorized this or known about it. An awful lot of things happen, Judge, that may or may not reach the President of the United States. I know that's frightening to people, but we need to come to terms with that reality. You have a national security advisor. There's a special portion of the law in which the president devolves some key responsibilities that he has

to his national security advisor that allows the national security advisor to sign off on certain activities. This includes, for instance, internal domestic surveillance. Just because the national security agency or the CIA or the FBI or anybody wants to do something that has an impact on national security, and they may want to do it internally or externally, doesn't mean they can do it. It has to be. Okay, but let's get to the drones. Is it more likely than not that somebody in the U.S. would have to have known ahead of time, not necessarily approved, but known of it because of U.S. intel.

Hey, Langley, do you know what they're up to? They're in Russia. They have the equipment there. They're flying drones that look like the commercial airlines, and these things are about to blow up a Russian fuel depot, and it's 200 miles from Putin's house. You should know about it. Is such a communication likely? I think the CIA knows, without a doubt. The National Security Agency knows.

That's indisputable. Whether they knew all the details and the people that were guiding these and where they were launched from, that's another matter. But they were definitely involved. Remember that they struck the bridge? Yeah. And that was done, we now think, by the SAS, the United Kingdom MI6 armed entity, special operations forces. So we don't know who did this. But were people aware that it was going to happen? Undoubtedly. Wouldn't Russian intel have known that something was coming at Russia, either from Ukraine or from within Russia? They may have, but they may not have known, as I said earlier, that they were

going to use the commercial airline routes or approaches as cover for these things. Okay. They may not have known that. They may have also not known the real destination. Again, if you have a small team on the ground that may be 30, 40, 50, 100 miles from the target, as this thing flies, it's picked up for control by the team on the ground, and the team directs it to its final destination.

They may not have had any idea what that was. All right. Now I want to have a little fun with you. We need to have some fun, Judge. All right, everybody, what is he going to do? One of our regular guests who presents the other side and who a lot of Freedom Watch viewers love to hate is Jack Devine. You probably know of him. Jack spent 40 years in the CIA and at one point was in charge of all American spying on Russia. So America's American spies in Russia. Here's what he had to say. It's cut number one, Gary, on flawed Russian intel. People are grossly underestimating the toughness of Ukrainians. When I was in the Afghan program, people underestimated. The Russian analyst in CIA thought Russia was seven feet, ten feet tall. People underestimate the grit and pain that people will put themselves through. After you kill family

members, cold weather is not going to blind you from fighting the Russians. You don't go into a country and you think you're going to take it over when the people are prepared to die to the first person. That was their number one intelligence failure in the invasion. They really didn't know, despite all the years, who they were fighting. And all their intelligence reports, some of them had their parade uniforms packed with them. Some of them had hotel reservations. They thought this was a cakewalk. How terrible does intelligence have to get? How bad is Russian intel, or is Jack putting his usual CIA spin on things? Well, we talked about the opening phase, and President Putin intended several things. First of all, he insisted that they minimize casualties to the civilian population, that they avoid

destroying infrastructure, because this was a show of force in the country designed to induce the Ukrainians in Washington to negotiate. He thought that we would be interested in avoiding a major war in Ukraine. He was wrong. Now, as far as underestimating the Ukrainians, that's difficult to say. They used a very small force because they had no intention of conquering Ukraine. This is a big lie. There was never any interest in conquering the country. They wanted the Russian citizens to have full rights before the law. They wanted the two autonomous regions to be treated decently because they were effectively Russians who wanted their own culture, language, and schooling. He wanted the Ukrainians to recognize legitimate Russian control of the Crimea that they'd had since the 1770s.

And they wanted Ukraine to be neutral. There was no goal associated with conquering Ukraine. So I don't know where he gets the parade uniforms and hotel reservations. That sounds like a bit much. But he is plugging the line. Right. If he wants to be on contract with the CIA from time to time and be paid consulting fees, he'd better plug the line.

You can sure as hell bet they're not going to hire me. That's for sure. Here's another one in which he refers to President Putin as a shrunken or miniature bully. Your friends and colleagues in the intel community in NATO think that Putin will be weakened by this war and maybe pushed out of office. Forget them. I've written to it in March, and I continue to say that. I think the diet was cast the day he walked across the border. They gave him shrinking pills. He became a miniature leader. The bully aspect's gone.

A guy gets beat up the way he's getting beat up. Who's he going to scare? And I read it. I'm sticking by it that you don't come back from this. How long is he going to protract it? But we should not fiddle inside his country trying to speed the process. He will take care of it and his people will because it will backfire if we get involved. Well, the one decent thing he said, you'll probably agree, is that we should not fiddle inside his country. Although I don't know that his former masters at the CIA will go for that. But does this make any sense to you? Putin is a miniaturized bully? What have we always done whenever we decided to attack another country? We immediately demonize its leadership. This is

a standard playbook. He's simply repeating, you know, what everybody says. I'm surprised he was so easy on Putin. I've heard far, far worse about Putin from all sorts of people, a mafia don, you know, all sorts of terrible things about a criminal and so forth and so on. This is just, once again, part of the standard routine. And I'm sure that's what he's doing. And he's going to stick with that when the Russian troops are all over Ukraine and there is no Ukrainian army, no Ukrainian government. He'll be talking about the revolution that's coming in Moscow. One more to go.

And I want you to listen carefully to the last two words of it, Gary. What has to happen, I think, is we get through the winter and the Russian people look around and say, here we go again. You know, our economy and the troops are going. I don't feel like going over there. I don't feel like dying. Have you seen the footage of some of the planes being shot down? I mean, some of the helicopters rather, and they're going in and they don't want to fight. They did the same thing in Afghan. The Russian soldiers did not want to fight in Afghan. Tremendous defection. You can't win a war. It's very hard to win a war when one side wants to fight and save their country and the other one really doesn't feel like getting involved. He has a sales job. So I think the trouble really begins for him when he starts to come back. And I think

the Russian people are going to start saying this is Putin's folly. Putin's folly, Colonel. I don't know. I think he may be heavily invested in the cannabis industry and is using too much of his favorite product. Let's be frank. Putin has never been more popular. The Russians, as a nation, are enraged. The only criticism that he's under at home is, why haven't you already crushed these evil people

that have done so many terrible things to us and their soldiers? Putin has deliberately minimized, as far as he can, the information about the terrible atrocities committed against captured Russian soldiers because he's afraid of the backlash. In addition to the 300,000 reservists he's mobilized, they've had 80,000 people volunteer to fight. So I don't know what this man's talking about. Again, I think a lot of this is just standard playbook. I don't think the man knows anything about Russians at all. How long will it take 540,000 Russian troops, well-trained and well-equipped, entering eastern Ukraine to march westward toward Kyiv?

Well, first of all, that assumes that, again, Kyiv is an immediate target. I don't think it is. You have three large concentrations, one in the south that can ultimately move north. The Ukrainians down there have been bled white. They're exhausted. They just moved in most of what we refer to as their foreign legion to Bakhmut because they can't get Ukrainian soldiers to attack anymore. They've taken so many casualties.

They're so exhausted. So they've got Polish troops with Americans and Brits, some other Europeans in a mix, plus some Romanians, and they're being moved down there with Ukrainian forces they can scrape together. Again, this is something the Russians welcome. They want more troops to pour into Bakhmut because then they can annihilate them, and that's what will happen. This is a hopeless situation. At some point when the decision is made to attack it, I think this man, Surovikin, has a set of conditions that he wants to be met.

Some of those have to do with equipment. Who is he, Colonel? Is he the new Russian commander? He's the four-star equivalent, Surovikin. He's the one that was installed late summer, early fall. He's created a unified military command structure. Before he took over, there were several separate entities who were making decisions independently of each other. All of that is over with. He has absolute control over everything. And he is approaching his preparations for this operation much as Field Marshal Montgomery did in 1942 before El Alamein. He is not going to be pushed into attacking any sooner than he thinks he needs to, and he has been using his tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, rocket artillery to systematically annihilate and destroy everything from command and control to the power grid, energy, storage, distribution,

transportation, infrastructure, you name it. And the Ukrainians are in very bad shape right now. I don't think they can sustain very many more strikes. And actually, millions of Ukrainians are being told by their own government, pack it up, move west, because we can't keep you in these cities. We can't heat the place. We can't protect them. And that's, of course, another positive development because the Russians would prefer that these places don't have civilians in them. It makes it much easier to conduct operations. So I think you're going to see massive offensives on at least two or three axes with a couple of hundred thousand troops on each one. And we'll see what they do. They're going to cut off the Polish border from Kiev. So there'll be an enormous Russian force

between the Polish border and Kiev. There'll be an enormous Russian force that encircles and cuts off and destroys what's left of the Ukrainian forces in the south. They'll come up from the south. This is almost a vice or a pincer movement with Kiev in the middle. Yeah. The last thing that they'll do is deal with Kiev. They want to annihilate the Ukrainian army. They talked about denazification for a long time. They're not going to rest until all of these Nazi formations

that everyone apologizes for in the West are gone. And once they're gone, then they'll turn their attention to Kiev. Now, there is concern, growing concern in Moscow that we would be foolish enough to take this 90,000 man coalition of the willing and try to rush into some part of Western Ukraine as the liberator or savior of what's left of Ukraine. And their assumption is that the Russians won't fight them. Well, the Russians obviously don't want a confrontation with us. But depending on how we do this and how far we're willing to go, we could end up losing those troops to enormous military power directed against them. We don't have the replacements. We don't have the fuel. We don't have the replacements. We don't have the fuel. We don't have the repair parts. We don't even have the ammunition anymore because we've given it all

to Ukraine. And we're on our own. Poles, a few Romanians, and us. The rest of NATO is not interested in marching eastward into Russia. So it's a dangerous situation. They're aware of it. And that's another reason why they fear that if they do end up in a confrontation with us and they utterly destroy our force on the ground, that we will then turn to the use of nuclear weapons. That's the concern. Got it. So much for Putin's folly. Colonel McGregor, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us today. Sure. Thank you, Judge. Judge Napolitano, for judging freedom. Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning.

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